The present invention is an improvement to my prior invention disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,662,536, which is incorporated by reference in its entirety herein.
In today's environment, people have a greater sensitivity to cleanliness. Health regulations rate requiring new levels of operating procedures in restaurants and other food service businesses to ensure clean service and a minimum of human contact. With the proliferation of communicable diseases and the perceived threat of AIDS, people are more critical of the establishments they attend.
Many smaller restaurants have coffee making machines in full view of their patrons. In a busy restaurant one can often see an employee manually placing a coffee filter from a stack into a container or manually placing a single filter into a coffee pot. Such manual contact may cause concern for some customers. Additionally, since filters often are difficult to separate digitally, when in a hurry a user may wind up licking or otherwise wetting their fingers to provide enough friction to separate the filters.
Restaurants are environments typically having a great deal of moisture from steaming foods, tea and coffee pots and dish washing apparatus in the vicinity. Such moisture can contain bacteria, other microorganisms, airborne contaminants, and the like, which can be absorbed by the filter. It would be desirable to have a filter dispenser that could be loaded from the top using a sealed "cartridge" or pack containing prepackaged filters. Such a dispenser would then substantially reduce or eliminate hand contact with the filters. My previous invention did not have a way to load the apparatus from the top, nor did it allow for addition of a set of prepackaged filters without using one's hands. Furthermore, my previous invention was not a sealed box; rather, it had an opening which might better off have been closable.
It is therefore a principal object of the present invention to provide an improved apparatus for dispensing single filters from a pack so as to minimize human contact with the filters.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a filter dispenser having a removable top that contains a sealable pack of filters that can be provided in a prepackaged form and can be unsealed and loaded in the dispenser with substantially no hand contact with the filters themselves.
It is an additional object of the present invention to provide a filter dispenser that is substantially sealable from external contamination by dust and other agents when not in use.